Digitally. We Deliver

The importance of conversion optimisation (CRO) for your business

By Chris Green / March 31st 2017

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of understanding your website visitors, optimising their experience and influencing their behaviour, ultimately making your business more efficient and profitable.

Going all the way from improving user experience to getting ahead of the competition, we explain the importance of CRO and why it should be a key part of your digital marketing strategy.

The importance of CRO today

Whether your objective is to motivate visitors to buy your products, enquire about your services or encourage sign ups, CRO is more important today than it’s ever been.

Here are some of the main reasons why CRO is essential for your business today:

More people are online and buy services online – 77% of UK internet users made purchases online in 2015

People’s habits of using the internet have also changed, like scrolling a page and not entering a site from the homepage

Visitors now expect a lot more from a website, such as a better user experience and quicker loading times – experts say load speed for a site should be less than 1.5 seconds

So, with all this in mind, how can CRO be used to capitalise on the changes to how people use websites?

Understanding user behaviour

CRO allows you to see how your customers use your website, understand how they navigate and the journeys they take. You can also see where they tend to enter and leave, how they use your internal search functionality, which pages they find useful and spend time on, and which they don’t.

By understanding this, CRO puts you in your customers’ shoes, allowing you to think as your visitors would. This is beneficial because you might think that some pages of your site are giving the customer what they want, when this might not actually be the case. With this information you can understand what might be preventing a visitor from completing your preferred intended action. You can then run experiments to find the most effective changes for your site that improve conversion.

Improving user experience

Good user experience is important for any website. With CRO you can learn where your website user experience is failing and improve it. It’s likely you can always find ways to make the conversion process that bit easier or quicker. This could include checking and improving loading times to a popular landing page that might be affecting your bounce rate, or testing and refining your internal search functionality to make it easier to use. Or it could involve amending and repositioning a call to action (CTA), so it’s more relevantly titled and placed.

Adding site value, saving money and increasing revenue

CRO can also help you understand the value of your site. It will enable you to visualise poor pages and those that have the most value, such as those from where the highest number of conversions are being achieved. This data is vital as it can show you where you need to make improvements to increase conversion and, in turn, your revenue.

CRO can show you that only little changes might need to be made, such as adding a button that makes it easier for a customer to buy a product. Small, cost-effective changes like this can have a great impact on conversions, saving you money in the process. This can encourage you to rethink strategies that could otherwise cost you money. For instance, heavily spending on advertising and PPC might be wasted when the buying process of your products, which may be complicated, is the problem.

Tailoring content and beating the competition

CRO isn’t just important for improving design, user experience, site value and functionality. It can play an important role in your content strategy too. By testing the popularity of your content pages you will know if you’re producing the right kind of content, which is covering informative topics that are relevant to your audience. By understanding what appeals to your audience, you can create more content that’s tailored specifically to your target market.

How we can help your business convert more visitors into customers

CRO is a key part of the work we do with our clients at every1. Our team includes experts in conversion optimisation, who can improve your website’s user experience, add site value and increase conversions, ultimately making your business more efficient and profitable.

We’d love to explore how our conversion optimisation strategies could deliver results for your business. To arrange a brief telephone conversation with one of our team call 0844 755 0350 or get in touch to find out more.